A most excellent film, on the greatest manhunt in history.
(The following review contains spoiler alerts)
This movie is like Valkyrie in that we all know how it’s going to end, with the death of Osama bin Laden. But even so, you still feel a chill not borne from the winter air as you watch it, wondering what’s going to happen, how it’s going to happen, and what will happen when it does.
Zero Dark Thirty, which manages to compact the decade-long hunt for the notorious leader of al-Qaeda into two-and-a-half hours, follows Maya, the determined to a fault CIA agent played by Jessica Chastain (who looks like my RA with the same first name). Maya is relentless, and willing to go to all sorts of lengths to find bin Laden. Throughout the movie, we see her start from a naive junior agent unnerved by the torture of a captured terrorist, to a capable interrogator and strategist, to a woman who, as her boss says, knows better than to mess with her when it comes to getting bin Laden. Besides that, we know nothing else about Maya, but we don’t need to; that’s not the point of this story.
The movie is dark, brilliantly told, and has none of the emotional stuff we usually associate with movies revolving around the CIA. Don’t expect Maya to strip down and have sex with an agent she finds very attractive; “I’m not that kind of girl”, she tells a friend right before a bomb blast in a restaurant. Also notice that there isn’t a lot of music, but the music that is there is awe-inspiring, and sometimes it’ll remind you of The Dark Knight trilogy.
The final scenes are the most amazing, as we follow the troops who go in and shoot bin Laden. The only problem with these scenes is that despite helicopters in suburban Aboottabbad and several blasts from explosives, there are only spectators after twenty minutes. What took so long? Still, the final death of Osama is quiet and not laid with any melodrama or huge emotion. Instead, he is killed, we see them hightailing it out of the compound (an excellent reproduction of the actual one, by the way), and then Maya confirming that Osama is dead, and the mission of the last ten years is over.
For all of the above, I give Zero Dark Thirty a 5 out of 5. Hats off to director Kathryn Bigelow and writer Mark Boal for some excellent handiwork.
Rami Ungar The Writer 